Excuse Us While We Kiss The Sky

By day they work as computer programmers and stock boys and academics. But at night they are known as urban explorers. The Brooklyn Bridge, London's Shard, Notre Dame—each structure is an expedition waiting to happen. Each sewer, each scaffold, each off-limits site is a puzzle to solve. No wonder the cops are after them. Matthew Power embeds with the space invaders and sees a world—above- and belowground—that the rest of us never knew existed

Editor’s Note: On March 10, 2014, journalist Matthew Power lost his life pursuing a story along the Nile River in Uganda. He left behind a body of work as diverse and compelling as the adventures, tragedies, and passions of his subjects. To honor Matt—and to encourage young writers to pursue new stories—the _Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award _at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University has been established. A** generous anonymous donor has offered to match all gifts contributed to the endowment, up to a total of $50,000_, between now and October 22—what would have been Matt’s 40th birthday. _DONATE NOW. **

_Donors who give $125+ will be sent their choice of one of five prints (82) donated by urban explorers featured in this story. You can view these select images on the Crowdrise page photo carousel. _

By day they work as computer programmers and stock boys and academics. But at night they are known as urban explorers. The Brooklyn Bridge, London's Shard, Notre Dame—each structure is an expedition waiting to happen. Each sewer, each scaffold, each off-limits site is a puzzle to solve. No wonder the cops are after them. Matthew Power embeds with the space invaders and sees a world—above and below ground—that the rest of us never knew existed

As Singapore Airlines flight 322 descended through the early-morning haze toward Heathrow, Bradley L. Garrett, Ph.D.—just Brad to his research subjects—looked out over the gray sprawl of London spreading to a horizon streaked by sunrise. He was returning from a monthlong study project in Cambodia, and seeing his adopted city of London again he thought about all the incomparably strange and wonderful things he had witnessed there over four years—all the dizzying heights and hidden depths.

The 747 touched down and taxied, its passengers cramped and bleary after the thirteen-hour flight. But when the aircraft reached the gate, its doors didn’t open. After several minutes, the pilot came on the intercom, and Garrett fired off a tweet: "Just landed at Heathrow and we are told the police are boarding our aircraft. Welcome home. x"

A group of uniformed officers from the British Transport Police entered the plane and came down the aisle. They stopped at his seat, 42K. "Dr. Garrett?" "Yes?" "We need you to come with us." An officer gripped each arm, and they led him down the aisle, past scores of wide-eyed passengers. In first class, former British prime minister Gordon Brown was furious over the delay.

Garrett was handcuffed and led through passport control, where his ID was seized. Fingerprints, mug shots, and DNA swabs followed. He was eventually led to a holding cell and then an interrogation room. There he was not formally charged but was informed that he was being investigated for burglary, property destruction, and criminal trespass, among numerous other possible charges. He was told he had been the subject of a manhunt by the British Transport Police. His alleged crimes were a blatant affront to the image of a high-tech security state London had constructed for itself. And yet, during his interrogation, an investigator leaned across the table and whispered: "Off the record, Bradley, I love the work that you do."

Despite his scholarly bona fides—his doctoral work in geography at Royal Holloway, University of London had garnered wide acclaim—Garrett scarcely looks the part of an academic, neither tweedy nor fusty. Thirty-two years old, with a trimmed goatee and a mop of straight brown hair hanging over black plastic frames, he grew up in Southern California and ran a skate shop before deciding to pursue a doctorate. His face, which is frequently lit up in mischievous, eyebrow-raised delight, still bears the pocks of over a dozen piercings he dispensed with in the interests of maintaining some veneer of academic respectability.

*How’s This for a To-Do List? * Bradley Garrett tells us his team’s dream targets.

1. Gwangmyong Ghost Station, North Korea.

"Apparently North Korea has a metro system in Pyongyang and, even better, an abandoned station hidden in its depths."

2. Fordlandia, Brazil.

"Henry Ford built this Michigan-style company town to harvest rubber from the Brazilian jungle in 1928. It’s now a ghost town.

3. Metro-2, Russia.

"This Moscow metro system was rumored to have been built by Stalin to transport the Soviet elite to the Kremlin, a secret airport, and a town beneath Ramenki. It’s guarded by guys with machine guns. We want in."

4. The Statue of Liberty Torch.

"Accessible via a fifty-four-rung ladder in the arm. And if we can’t take the ladder, we’ll shoot an arrow tied with fishing line up to the torch from the crown and rig ropes like we did at the Angel of the North in England. Game on."

But it was his doctoral research itself that was perhaps most punk rock. His dissertation in human geography, which he had defended the previous year, was entitled "Place Hacking." The title came from his argument that physical space is coded just like the operating system of a computer network, and it could be hacked—explored, infiltrated, re-coded—in precisely the same ways. He conducted a deep ethnographic study of a small crew of self-described "urban explorers" who over several years had infiltrated an astonishing array of off-limits sites above and below London and across Europe: abandoned Tube stations, uncompleted skyscrapers, World War II bomb shelters, derelict submarines, and half-built Olympic stadiums. They had commandeered (and accidentally derailed) an underground train of the now defunct Mail Rail, which once delivered the Royal Mail along a 23-mile circuit beneath London. They had pried open the blast doors of the Burlington bunker, a disused 35-acre subterranean Cold War-era complex that was to house the British government in the event of nuclear Armageddon. The London crew’s objective, as much as any of them could agree on one, was to rediscover, re-appropriate, and reimagine the urban landscape in what is perhaps the most highly surveilled and tightly controlled city on earth.

The catch-all term for these space-invading activities is "Urbex," and in recent years it has grown as a global movement, from Melbourne to Minneapolis to Minsk. The Urbex ethos was, in theory, low-impact: no vandalism, no theft, take only photographs; as one practitioner put it, "a victimless crime." Urbex is staunchly anticommercial (Converse was widely mocked in the scene when it released an urban-exploration-themed sneaker), and yet has an undercurrent of self-promotion, with many explorers selling their photographs to the media or publicizing them on blogs and web forums. Despite some initial skepticism about the legitimacy of the topic by his university advisers, Urbex proved to be a rich avenue of inquiry for Garrett—far better than his initial plan to study modern-day Druids. But in the course of his research Garrett had gone native in a big way, acting both as a scientific observer of a fractious subculture and an active participant in their explorations. And he made no excuses for that. "The whole definition of ethnography is that it’s participation," he told me. "You go out and you interact with people, and you live with them, and you understand their lives."

One of the risks of going native, of course, is becoming the public face of the movement you are documenting. Earlier in the year, Garrett’s face was splashed across the British tabloid media as a de facto Urbex spokesman when his crew (whom he also refers to as his "project participants" and "research subjects," depending on the context) released an astonishing series of photos taken high atop the unfinished superstructure of London’s 1,016-foot Shard, the second-tallest building in Europe. People were amazed to see shots of black-masked explorers standing casually atop construction cranes, the city glittering below as if viewed from an airplane.

There was some dismay that a city investing well over $1 billion on security in the run-up to the Olympics would be caught off guard so easily. (There were said to be more British soldiers on duty for the Games in London than stationed in Afghanistan.) The specter of terrorism was invoked, though Garrett saw his group’s role—like that of "white hat" computer hackers—as probing security flaws to expose them, and even suggested, half-seriously, that he and his crew should be hired as consultants. Garrett looked at exploration more as an act of playful subversion than outright revolution. To prove it, he had invited me to come along and see their hidden world for myself.

I arrived at Heathrow on a red-eye from New York at the exact same time as Garrett was being detained. After waiting three hours for him at the baggage claim, I took a cab to Garrett’s flat in South London. There the mystery deepened. The door frame was splintered, and the shattered door was held shut by a pair of fist-sized padlocks. A neighbor told me the police had smashed in the door at 6 a.m., just as Garrett was landing. It would turn out that five other members of his crew—"project participants" all—had been swept up in a series of simultaneous raids across London.

As it turned out, the police had not come after Garrett for the notorious Shard tower climb. They were interested in another hack: Garrett’s foray into an old World War II bomb shelter. Hundreds of feet below the streets, the Clapham Common "deep shelter" had been mothballed for decades, until the government rented it out to an American secure-file-storage company called Iron Mountain. Garrett had found a way in through a massive airshaft a few blocks from his house. A door had been forced open, and then, accompanied by several friends, Garrett had rappelled a hundred feet down into the darkness. The magnetic door alarm was disarmed with gaffer’s tape, and the group spent an evening cheerfully rummaging through box after box of bank files and legal documents. There was little to titillate in the vast archive, as none of it seemed particularly top secret, but nevertheless they recorded the entire expedition for posterity. In his 359-page dissertation, Garrett documented exactly how the entire operation was carried out in minute detail. During his interrogation, the investigators flipped through his phone-book-sized dissertation for reference. There was even a picture of him, grinning impishly, next to a stack of secure-file storage bos.

Garrett finally arrived at his apartment that evening, twelve hours after he’d been detained. The police had given him keys to the padlocks they’d attached, and the door swung open crookedly. "When they gave me the keys," he said, "I told them 'I hope you locked my house up better than you lock up your Tube stations.’ "

Swigging from the bottle of Jim Beam Black he’d asked me to pick up at duty-free, Garrett surveyed the damage. They had also hoped to find Urbex paraphernalia like manhole keys, bolt cutters, lock picks, and high-visibility fluorescent vests used to pass oneself off as a utility worker. Even the curved underwire of a brassiere, which can be used to slip a latch from the outside, would have been considered evidence of criminal intent. But the police had found nothing when they arrived. Garrett had hoped to rent his small studio out on Craigslist while traveling, and the place had been left as empty and spotless as a hotel room.

In the accrued pile of mail on the floor, there was a letter from Oord University, offering Garrett a paid research position in the coming academic year. He had only to bring his passport to fill out some forms.

"Fuck," he muttered, running his fingers through his hair and pacing around the tiny studio as if caged. His passport, of course, was now in the hands of the British authorities. The Transport Police had interrogated Garrett for several hours, asking dozens of questions about his activities and affiliations, all of which he answered with "No comment."

Garrett was understandably despondent, and given the world of shit he had just entered—arrest, police investigation, the possibility of deportation—I assumed that he would wish to beg off on the extensive itinerary he had planned for my visit. I offered to leave him to deal with his problems.

"No way," he said, looking up from the wreckage around him with a grin. "I’m doubling down."

By midnight, five of us were cruising through the streets of South London in a cartoonishly tiny Renault Twingo dubbed "The Twinkie," the GPS preprogrammed with the locations of dozens of manholes and Tube stations. I was crammed into the backseat with several visiting explorers: A computer programmer from France named Marc who goes by the nom de Urbex Explo; Luca, a 28-year-old intensive-care doctor from Italy with a penchant for subterranean exploration; and Helen*, a strawberry-blonde 23-year-old photographer from northeast England, who goes by the nickname Urban Fox. Helen loved climbing bridges more than anything: Her website showed a nighttime self-portrait, taken high atop the Manhattan Bridge, posed au naturel. Given that our** **first adventure was subterranean, its only obvious omission was the group’s underground guru, Greg—nicknamed Otter after going headfirst into a sewer. Otter had an almost Aspergerian level of knowledge covering the hundreds of miles of sewer tunnels, storm drainages, and underground rivers that snake beneath London. The rest of the crew joke that he’s a "drainspotter." He had been arrested in the sweep that nabbed Garrett and had a prior court order banning him from exploring in London.

"He hasn’t been banned from exploring," clarified Explo, whose French-and-Cockney-inflected English lent itself well to one-liners. "He’s been banned from getting caught."

Still, Otter had kindly traced out a route for us to cross London entirely underground, something Garrett insisted was "a first in human history." Before we set out, Otter had asked if I had ever been in a sewer, and I admitted that I had not.

"I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s pleasant, as that would be an outright lie," he told me. "But you will be surprised to find how not as bad as you’d think it would be it actually is."

Reassuring. How about safety?

"As long as you time your route with the tides in the Thames," said Otter, "the chance of drowning will be very low."

I see. And will there be rats?

"Lots."

As we passed the hordes of lager louts and lasses lined up outside clubs and vomiting in dustbins, Garrett expressed his dismay that his own activities were the ones considered inappropriate. "The primary hobby in England is getting absolutely fucked and getting into a fight, or dressing like a hooker and wandering the streets." Why should an activity as wholesome as Urbex be criminalized? He was convinced the authorities found it suspect precisely because it seemed pointless to them and fit no neat theory of social order.

Following Otter’s directions, we parked near a railway overpass and quickly suited up in waders and headlamps, trying to look as casual as possible as Garrett and Explo argued over the precise location we were looking for. When they found it, Explo stage-whispered "Action!" Garrett pulled out a T-shaped metal key and inserted it into a hatch in the sidewalk. It** **opened with a rusty shriek. "That’s how you pop a lid," he said. In an instant we were piling down slippery rungs into a dank and pitch-black hole. Garrett descended last, and I heard the manhole cover slam shut with a funereal clang.

*Names of some explorers have been changed.

We stood in the foot-deep stream of sewer water flowing down the tunnel. So that’s like, storm runoff and bathwater and such? I asked.

"That’s everything, dude," replied Garrett. "Even the Fresh."

"The Fresh" is Urbex-speak for shit.

We walked for what seemed like hours along an eight-foot-high tunnel. The experience encompassed an almost laughable agglomeration of stock phobias—darkness, rats, germs, drowning—but** **Otter was right: It smelled merely musty, not toxic, like wading down an underground stream, and soon I was swept up in the general enthusiasm of the company. As we started sloshing north, the crew’s whoops of delight reverberated—sounding almost Auto-Tuned in the strange acoustics. Garrett told me he had once brought an inflatable raft down here and drifted along with London’s effluent flow.

I began to get an inkling of the "radical freedom" Garrett had described in Urbex. In his dissertation he described the sewers as having a "noxious comfort," and sees them as a zone of total self-reliance and personal responsibility. It was true. In a city said to have 200,000 security cameras, we were unmonitored and completely alone. The compass app on my iPhone was utterly useless, spinning in disoriented circles.

Commissioned by Parliament after the Great Stink of 1858, London’s 1,200-mile Victorian sewer system is one of the great public works of the nineteenth century, rescuing the city from scourges of cholera and typhus. Their chief engineer, Joseph Bazalgette, might be surprised that he has become something of an Urbex hero, given the honorific "J-Bizzle."

Otter had originally calculated that our journey beneath London, well over fifteen miles, would take about thirty hours to complete. But we missed a crucial turn somewhere in the warren of tunnels and soon reached an impasse, our way blocked by a Dantean lake of sewage. Explo wanted to backtrack, and Helen wanted to sleep in the sewer, but logic and exhaustion won out. We popped out into the middle of a quiet side street as a rosy dawn broke over London. We had, by some space-time wormhole, emerged only a few blocks from Garrett’s flat, and we stripped off our hip waders before crashing on his floor, filthy and beat, a chair wedged against the broken door.

We continued on, like caffeinated vampires, sleeping by day and exploring the city after dark. Midnight was the new noon. One night we popped a lid on Fleet Street, where London’s largest subterranean river lay buried beneath the city, and descended into the Fleet chamber, a massive tidal gate and storm outflow with gorgeous cathedral arches of brick. Almost no Londoner would ever see it, or even be aware of its existence beneath their feet. I glanced nervously at my watch, as the journey was timed with the tide on the Thames to lessen the risk of drowning. Garrett cracked a beer.

When we came out dripping from the underworld, a double-decker bus rolled past, but the driver paid no attention to our extremely conspicuous group emerging from a manhole at 2 a.m. We circled around the city again, Garrett restless, looking for something. He spied a ten-story construction site surrounded by chain-link and scaffolding. There was a small gap in the fence, just big enough to slip through. Garrett hauled himself effortlessly through to the scaffold. Wary of security guards and CCTV cameras, I followed as silently and elegantly as a bear clambering into a Dumpster. We made our way up an internal stairwell to the roof and onto the ladder of a massive construction crane. Finally we were sitting right next to the control cabin 150 feet up, feet dangled over the void, London glittering to the horizon. Garrett pointed out landmarks, famous and less so: Big Ben, the Eye, the Shard, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Gherkin, the Walkie-Talkie, King’s Reach Tower. The names sounded like constellations or rock-climbing routes. In fact, he had summited most of them.

The risks were as real as in mountaineering, of course. Explo had nearly fallen from a church steeple when a rusty ladder rung broke off in his hands, and Otter had once broken his arm in a sewer. A few weeks earlier, there had been a rumor that a Russian explorer had died falling through a skylight while crossing a rooftop. Another well-known British explorer had fallen to his death from a hotel balcony in Thailand. Predictably, the explorers minimized the risk. "The percentage of us who actually die is pretty low for what we do," said Explo. The Urbex ethos precluded suing property owners over injuries, and Garrett described the awareness and acceptance of risk, and a sort of dance with it, with a term he’d appropriated from Hunter S. Thompson: "edgework."

As if to demonstrate the concept, Garrett climbed out onto the 100-foot jib of the crane, angled like a fishing rod high above the city. There was no ladder, nothing between him and the black cabs cruising the street far below. His movements along the fog-slicked struts were as deliberate as a stalking cat’s. Edgework.

For Garrett, physical exploration is merely the outward manifestation of a deeper philosophical inquiry. The theoretical DNA of much of his work traces back to the concept of "psychogeography," defined by the French Situationist philosopher (and noted alcoholic) Guy Debord in 1955 as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment...on the emotions and behavior of individuals." Debord encouraged a practice called dérive ("drift" in French), which entailed wandering through an urban landscape guided only by shifting feelings, unmoored from the duties and associations of daily life. This means of spacily rebooting the urban environment is taken to its logical extreme with Urbex.

The canonical text of the Urbex movement is a book called Access All Areas, a work that’s meant to serve as both spiritual and practical guide to a hobby that counters a consumer culture filled with "safe and sanitized attractions that require an admission fee." Its pseudonymous author, Ninjalicious, was a 31-year-old Canadian named Jeff Chapman, who had first written about his exploits in the 1990s in a self-published zine called Infiltration. Chapman died of liver cancer in 2005, just weeks before his book was published, and his death has given his life’s work an aura of unimpeachable, almost Christlike authenticity.

Garrett sees his own work as restoring the true spirit of Ninjalicious, pushing the Urbex boundaries beyond the trendy venues: derelict and abandoned buildings. The Urbex term for derelict structures is derp, the sort of places made famous by the romantically postapocalyptic photography of decaying infrastructure nicknamed "ruin porn." "The roots of urban exploration are actually in infiltration, and we’ve forgotten that as a community," said Garrett. "We’re bringing it back to its core. We’re seizing it from those fucking ruin fetishists." Garrett calls for a more radical set of tactics into what he calls "live sites." He sees this kind of unsanctioned reclamation of space as the best means to regain freedom in a society that is utterly cordoned and securitized. He carries sheets of stickers that read explore everything, which he affis as a sort of calling card everywhere he goes.

Some cities are more suited to this go-anywhere philosophy than others. London’s vast security apparatus, for instance, presents a set of challenges that could be described as Orwell Lite: ubiquitous cameras, by-the-book cops, and a passive-aggressively reinforced expectation of propriety. The city is infused with a sort of pre-apocalyptic nervousness. This can add to the thrill, of course, but when the State kicks in your door, it’s always a bummer. Paris, on the other hand, is spoken of in the Urbex scene in the way Okies might have invoked California. "In Paris, they don’t give a shit," said Garrett. "The quality of life is so much higher there, because people let you get on with what you want to get on with, they’re not in your face all the time about it."

Garrett had initially suggested we go there, but given the confiscation of his passport, it was out of the question. Britain had become a prison island for him, and he didn’t want to risk hacking his way out and back in again. But Explo and Helen wanted me to see it, and Otter wanted to go somewhere he wasn’t legally enjoined from exploring, so we packed our gear and contorted ourselves into Explo’s car and made for the Chunnel, with Garrett escorting us to the border.

We slept that night in the overgrown ruins of a Napoleonic fortress above Dover, drinking cheap port beneath a roof of stars. Garrett said he felt some kinship with Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who was just then holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, after seeking political asylum and fighting extradition. They had different methods, of course, but each sought to liberate information, to reveal secrets. And both were now suffering the freedom-limiting consequences.** **Garrett was pensive, feeling caged almost, and worried about the pile of legal trouble he was in and what the future might hold. There was also the matter of his outstanding student loans. In the morning, he glumly boarded the train at Dover back toward London.

The following midnight I found myself following Explo’s command of Action!, climbing after him over a construction fence surrounding a half-built office tower in La Défense, the central business district of Paris. We found the main stairwell and humped thirty-eight stories up, legs burning, and gasping for breath. The building, designed by the American starchitect Robert A.M. Stern, had the unimprovable name Carpe Diem. There were a half-dozen explorers in the group, including Patch, a 25-year-old Brit who was currently wanted in London on the same warrant for which Garrett had been arrested. Patch’s most recent job was as a stock manager at a Walmart, but for now he was staying in a squat and planning to return to London in a few months when the heat was off.

We came out onto the darkened concrete roof and then scaled the metal stairs of a looming tower crane, sweat freezing in the now alpine air. In the sharp wind, the crane swiveled side to side like a giant weather vane. Paris flowed and pulsed 600 feet below us, but it was eerily quiet at that height. In the distance, the Eiffel Tower erupted into a glittering laser-light spectacle to mark the hour. Several people crammed into the operator’s cab of the crane, which—quelle surprise!—still had the keys in it. Someone scrolled through the crane’s commands on its touch screen. I asked them to stop touching the fucking buttons, please.

Exiting the building site after the long walk down, Explo whispered in a mock video-game voice: "Level Two, complete."

It occurred to me then that Explo’s cry of "Action!" at the beginning of each adventure had a double meaning. It was both a call to arms and a director’s command in the fantasy movie of his own life, in which he was the auteur and hero both. The Urbex life is at heart a form of play, a pressure valve to regulate the atmospheric crush of daily life. Explo, at his programming job, might daydream of a manhole in the floor of his cubicle, of some escape from the mundane requirements of modern society. Once you begin playing this game, the entire world becomes filled with secret doors.

Some doors hide better secrets than others. One afternoon as we weaved through chaotic traffic, Explo pulled up next to a middle-aged black man with long dreadlocks and an army jacket, sitting on a park bench. "Ça va, Dirty!" he called, sticking his head out the sunroof. They conversed rapidly in French, then Explo popped back down. "That’s Dirty. He invited us to a party later. It’s funny, I consider him a friend and yet I’ve never seen him more than ten meters from a manhole. He’s a cataphile."

A cataphile is an aficionado of the vast network of catacombs, quarried over centuries from the soft limestone beneath the city. Nobody knows for sure how far they extend, but hundreds of miles of tunnels have been charted, underlying a tenth of Paris—a city of darkness beneath the City of Light. They are as integral to Parisians’ mythical sense of their city as sidewalk cafés and unfiltered Gauloises. Barely a mile of the catacombs are open to the public, but a wide subculture of the creative and clandestine have used the network for decades. Late that night we returned to the same spot where Explo had spotted Dirty. There was a steel hatch right on the sidewalk, and Explo pointed out the places where it had been repeatedly spot-welded shut by the police and subsequently broken open by the cataphiles. He glanced around, quickly pulled the lid open, and we descended down a dark ladder.

From down a stone side passage came a sound of echoing laughter, the smell of hash smoke, and the flickering yellow light of a carbide lantern. Dirty held court before a half dozen visitors, dripping candles affid around the room. He told me he had come down for a party sixty-two days ago and just decided never to leave except to resupply and use the facilities. (There are no bathrooms belowground.) He warned me to "respect the catas." The tunnels were originally begun as quarries, but have served over the years as smuggling routes and ossuaries. During World War II, the Nazis and the Resistance had neighboring catacomb bunkers, each unaware of the other’s proximity. Explo pointed to an inscription carved in a stone monument, dedicated to the memory of Philibert Aspairt. Like J-Bizzle in the sewers of London, Aspairt is a legend of the catacombs. He had gone missing while exploring down here in 1793, but his body wasn’t found until 1804. We were having a party in his tomb.

Dirty led us down a narrow tunnel, which opened up into a large gallery. The leave-no-trace ethic of place hacking doesn’t exactly apply in the catacombs; rather, they are a vast work in progress, just like the city above. Graffiti pieces and stencils covered the walls. More ambitious artists had carved relief sculptures into the stone itself, and one had spent what must have been weeks installing a graffiti mosaic out of thousands of tiny tiles. There was a lending library stocked with moisture-swollen paperbacks and a huge lounge table carved from a block of stone. There had been film screenings, and people had swum in the underground lake beneath the Paris opera house. In places along the tunnel, side shafts had been dug, called chatières, literally "cat flaps," connecting branches or forming new chambers. I followed Explo down one and nearly had a panic attack before I found a spot wide enough to turn back. All this work had been done in total darkness, fifty feet below the streets, all for the delight and edification of the relatively small group of adventurers who might find their way there.

After we made our way out, I sat in a sidewalk café in broad daylight, drinking a café au lait and eating a perfect galette au chèvre, refusing to acknowledge to gawkers that I was aware I was covered head to toe in beige catacomb mud. So much of Urbex is an exquisitely crafted inside joke, done for its own beautifully pointless sake, like the explorer who put a necktie on a statue in the pediment of the Panthéon, 120 feet above the Latin Quarter. He did tag a photo of it on Flickr, of course.

That day we fell asleep on the grass almost beneath the Eiffel Tower, its riveted latticework swooshing into the blue heavens. Surely it would be the greatest climb in all of Paris, I observed. Explo agreed, were it not for the heavily armed soldiers patrolling its base. But he said he knew somewhere else just as sublime.

At the stroke of one, the spotlights that bathed Notre Dame Cathedral in a noontime glare were finally flipped off, and a group of singing drunks gathered along the Left Bank brought out their congas. This provided excellent cover as Explo, Helen, Otter, and I crossed the Pont Saint-Louis to Île de la Cité and clambered around a corona of iron spikes forty feet above the Seine. We crossed a shaded park and scaled another spiked fence, careful not to snag backpacks heavy with camera equipment and enough mountaineering gear to assault the Matterhorn. We spoke in whispers as we pulled on climbing harnesses, and looked up through the darkness at the soaring Gothic buttresses and pinnacles of the irreplaceable monument of world heritage we were about to climb.

I felt a twinge of conscience. Or rather something more than a twinge. They warn you in journalism school—or so I’m told—about the risks of going too deep with the subjects of your work, of losing grasp of the dispassionate objectivity necessary to report a balanced story. Garrett had already dealt with this ethical quicksand by surfing gleefully across it, unashamed of his decision to "become a part of the culture under study," as he put it. I stood before the same quagmire. It wasn’t really about breaking the law, as I’d already done that many times over in two different countries. Standing there at the base of the 850-year-old cathedral, I felt conflicted between my deep desire to climb it and my equally deep desire to not be splashed across the French tabloids—not to mention the French flagstones—as the idiot American who snapped off a gargoyle before plunging to his doom.

But Explo was already halfway up, and he soon anchored a climbing line to belay us from above. I let the tide of Action! bear me along and started up the rope using special spelunking ascenders attached to my harness. I promised Explo to omit a few salient details about our route from this narrative; suffice it to say, nothing was harmed in the climb. But the intimacy with the building was startling. I passed so closely by a carved gargoyle I could see the furrows of its brow, could almost smell its breath. Atop the first roof we found ourselves in a long gallery of flying buttresses, which spanned outward like the landing struts of some alien spacecraft. Each buttress framed a fifty-foot arched stained-glass window, darkened from within, and as we climbed to the next level, I pulled myself up next to one. I spun slowly on the rope, and for a heart-stopping instant my shoulder rested gently against the glass. I was so close I could see the seams of lead that connected the thousands of pieces of colored glass, the end result of centuries of labor at the hands of nameless artisans. I felt in that moment I would rather fall than damage it.

Three hours and three pitches brought us to the peak of the south transept, 180 feet above the Seine, which flowed past inkily as the drunks still drummed on the far side. My hands were black from the lead roof tiles. Carved saints and angels and a demonic bestiary of gargoyles peered from every nook, and the central steeple pierced the night sky. I’m not a believer at all, but I felt something akin to what I’d always imagined to be the intended reaction to a great cathedral, some visceral mix of awe and fear.

Across by the bell towers, you could see the corralled viewing platform where the public is actually allowed. No doubt it’s great. But as the Urbex ethos has it, buying a ticket, and obediently going the way you are told, is the exact opposite of the point. So there we were, at 4 a.m., witness to a sublimity almost nobody else would ever know. As it happened, the French Resistance had rung the cathedral’s bells this very night in 1944, to signal the liberation of Paris. It was not nearly the same scale of freedom, of course, but it sufficed.

It was almost dawn, and we rappelled down the way we’d come, scaling the fences and dropping back out to the street. When we returned to the car, Explo asked Helen for his car keys. She was quite certain she had given them to him. He was quite certain she hadn’t. Frantic searching of bags commenced as the sky lightened. Finally Explo ran back, scaling the fences again to hunt for the keys where they had fallen from Helen’s pocket and off the roof of the cathedral. Small miracle, he found them.

We pulled over at a truck stop on the outskirts of Paris, standing in line behind the bleary-eyed and glum denizens of the morning shift. Helen surveyed the scene in dismay. "None of those people know where we were two hours ago. You’re just back to normal life, and it sucks."

Returning to London, we found Garrett trying to bring some order to the chaos that had spun out of his life. He had gotten his door replaced, though it would likely be months before the socialist bureaucracy got around to compensating him for it. But his fate was far from clear. Since he couldn’t leave the UK, he would likely have to cancel a talk he was scheduled to give for Google in Arizona (topic: "Exploring the World Around Us"), and his job with Oord might be threatened by his tenuous legal status. For all he knew, he’d be deported after his court hearing in a few months. But his spirit, to all outward appearances, was unflagging.

Garrett wanted to show me one final site, the gargantuan Art Deco hulk of the Battersea Power Station, with its four chimneys reaching 340 feet. Battersea is the iconic structure on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Animals, a great ruined dinosaur skeleton of industrial civilization. It’s been derelict since the early ’80s and the subject of an endless string of redevelopment boondoggles. Most recently it had served as a parking lot for hundreds of police vehicles during the Olympics.

Waiting for a security patrol to roll by, we squeezed through a hole in the fence, sprinted across a weedy no-man’s-land, and clambered up stairwells through the pigeon-flapping blackness. The power station’s control room was the size of a basketball court, a steampunk fever dream of endless dials and switches and levers, like an analog nerve center for the city-of-tomorrow of yesteryear. The sense of touching unsanitized history, of being able to measure time in the accumulation of dust, was enormously powerful. Garrett threw levers back and forth, flipping dead switches in some sort of Dr. Who fantasy. "This is what they won’t let you do in museums," he said.

We climbed higher and emerged into the rainy night, onto the scaffolding surrounding one of the chimneys, and scaled it to its top, halfway up the southwest stack, which was big enough to swallow a double-decker bus. A wavering reflection of London slid by on the surface of the Thames several hundred feet below, and trains maneuvered by at tilt-shift scale. The city looked like a misty diorama.

But an explorer can never rest, least of all Bradley L. Garrett, Ph.D. "Everyone’s bored here, everything’s been done," he said, fretting that all London’s mysteries had been plucked. "We’re just sort of waiting for the next big thing."

People tend to age out of Urbex, get respectable and lose the spark of curiosity that called them to explore in the first place. There are very few people who keep exploring after 40, he told me. He hoped he could avoid that fate. He looked forward to the twenty-mile Super-Sewer project, scheduled to be finished by 2025, and the Crossrail tunnel being dug beneath London. And even if he were deported, banished from this island that had offered him such incomparable visions, there were always other options, other places. He’d heard of a secret Soviet subway system beneath Moscow. And the colossal sewers of Tokyo. And the Second Avenue subway line being dug beneath Manhattan. He had always fantasized about piloting a tunnel-boring machine. The world was full of hidden possibilities.

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